Question about UMS

These questions often jump on you on Christmas Eve!

Anyway - most of the time at GCSE raw marks were just doubled to give you your UMS e.g. in geograpgy they'd mark the coursework out of 40 and then double your mark and put it out of 80 for ums.

Are they sort of... scaled... at all at A'level? I know that it's supposed to be 80% for an A, but is that 80% in UMS marks? Because I got around 72% for politics and 78% for geography (in mocks) and my teachers both gave me As using the mark schemes. When put into UMS would they work out to being over 80%?

Also with English lit. our paper is out of 20, so to get an A (16) you can only get 80%, 85%, 90% etc... is that right?

Thanks guys, have a nice Christmas!

Reply 1

Cirsium

19

Yes they're scaled - because for a subject like Maths it's relatively easy for somebody with talent to get a perfect score. But for something like a French oral exam even a native speaker would be likely to drop a mark or two.
For General studies the conversion is horrific - something like 50% raw marks needed to get 100UMS :eek:

Reply 2

LibbyO

They're definitely scaled, but I can't understand how. Because I was told in Physics that normally 85% raw mark would be converted to 100% UMS, so I assumed they were all shifted up depending on how people did. But then I asked for a copy of my Chemistry paper where I got a UMS of 85%, but my actual mark was 89%. So they must use weird statistics to shift them both ways. I don't know!

Reply 3

Gooner

14

AisAis

These questions often jump on you on Christmas Eve!

Anyway - most of the time at GCSE raw marks were just doubled to give you your UMS e.g. in geograpgy they'd mark the coursework out of 40 and then double your mark and put it out of 80 for ums.

Are they sort of... scaled... at all at A'level? I know that it's supposed to be 80% for an A, but is that 80% in UMS marks? Because I got around 72% for politics and 78% for geography (in mocks) and my teachers both gave me As using the mark schemes. When put into UMS would they work out to being over 80%?

Also with English lit. our paper is out of 20, so to get an A (16) you can only get 80%, 85%, 90% etc... is that right?

Thanks guys, have a nice Christmas!

A-Levels (and even GCSEs) are scaled. For A-Levels, the scaling is dependent upon the difficulty of the paper; a harder paper will be scaled to reflect the difficulty of the paper, i.e, you'll need fewer raw marks to get full UMS marks than on an easier paper where everybody was getting highish marks :smile:

The percentage to get an A is indeed 80% in UMS marks, 70% for a B, 60% for a C and so on, so when your teacher gave you an A for getting 78% it could have been because the boundary for an A was something like 75% in raw marks :smile:

Hope that helps somewhat :smile:

Reply 4

michaelyus

10

http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=404653

Has a lot of info on the UMS to raw system.